HOME / politics: Who's winning, who's losing, and why.

Mitt's Fred HitsRomney takes the lead in softening up Fred Thompson.

By John DickersonPosted Monday, July 23, 2007, at 11:47 AM ET

Mitt Romney Mitt Romney has been increasing his assault on the Democratic front-runners recently. During a recent campaign swing, he returned to a theme found in his earliest speeches: "The Democratic candidates want to run the largest enterprise in the world—the government of the United States—and yet have never run a corner store.'' To make sure reporters get the point, Romney's campaign has sent e-mails highlighting this attack and links to local wire stories featuring it.

RSS

Republican voters usually like to hear their candidates beat up the opposition, so the broad attack helps Romney in his effort to look like the party front-runner. But according to Romney insiders, the former Massachusetts governor is not just aiming at Clinton, Obama, and Edwards. His other, perhaps more salient target, is fellow Republican Fred Thompson. Like the Democratic front-runners, Fred Thompson has also never run anything, though he has pretended to run all kinds of things in his many films. Romney is laying the groundwork against Thompson now and plans to make the charge explicitly when the actor gets into the race.

Meanwhile, lolling on the sidelines seems to be working nicely for Thompson. He's second in national polls, in key early states like Iowa and South Carolina and in big states like Florida. As the dream candidate of conservatives who are disappointed with the current Republican field, Thompson threatens Romney's efforts to cultivate social conservatives, so that's why the former Massachusetts governor has been the most aggressive of the Republican candidates in going after him.

The Romney campaign was also thinking about Thompson when it produced its latest television ad about the depravity of modern culture. The ad is primarily an assault on the extended metaphor, but its purpose is to appeal to social conservative voters who think the country is on the wrong track. (This is also why Romney has picked a fake fight with Barack Obama over sex education.) The ad's secondary function is to show Republicans that only Romney can talk about values. Thompson can compete with Romney in opposing abortion and gay marriage, but as a former actor, he's compromised on the subject of cleaning up sex and violence in movies and television. "Why didn't he speak out loudly about Hollywood when he was of Hollywood?" Romney may ask in a future debate.

To draw contrasts between their guy and Thompson, Romney allies are working behind the scenes, and even Thompson's wife is fair game. June Bond, a Republican from Spartanburg, introduced Ann Romney at a recent rally as her husband's starter wife and trophy wife "all in one." This called up a loaded phrase for Thompson's much younger second wife from a New York Times piece.

Romney, who has been crossing the country getting little sleep, shaking an endless string of hands and eating spongy food at fund-raisers is reportedly a little miffed that Thompson thinks he can coast into the nomination. In his public remarks though, Romney is sticking to oblique rather than direct attacks. In a recent interview with the Washington Examiner, he made a not-too-subtle allusion to Thompson's reputation for laziness. "Will he do the work it takes to become the president?" asked Romney. "To beat Hillary Clinton ... you're going to have to work like crazy." Of course, Romney hopes Thompson never has a chance to face the Democratic front-runner. And so before the actor even gets into the race, Romney is trying to create more work than he can handle.

E-MAIL

RECOMMEND... Get Slate RSS Feeds

John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail. He can be reached at .

Photograph of Mitt Romney by Eric Thayer/Getty Images.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

Romney is gambling that social conservatives have such a stranglehold on the nomination process of the Republican Party that they alone can block any candidate. And I strongly suspect that it's not really Thompson who his cultural message is aimed at, but Giuliani. Thompson's wife's age, as long as she's not jail bait, won't resonate much with voters, and since Ronald Reagan never said anything about sex and violence in Hollywood, why would one expect Thompson to do so?

None of the Ten Commandments has anything to say about your wife's age. The Commandments do, however, deal with what Giuliani did, openly, while mayor of New York. He admitted that he was an adulterer, and then went right on being an adulterer until his second divorce came through. In New York City, this elicits yawns. Not so elsewhere.

Romney, of course, has his own cultural skeletons in the closet but he's assuming -- probably correctly -- that he'll be able to explain them away if he gets the Republican nomination. What he'll have a lot more trouble explaining away is why on Earth anyone should elect a true blue social conservative when even true blue social conservatives have come to realize that, once their guy is in office, they are sold out. Their only use to the super-rich is to elect men like Bush and Romney, whose real concerns are low taxes and destroying the social safety net which even true blue social conservatives depend upon.

--the_slasher14

(To reply, click here.)

So, does this help him or hurt him? What if Thompson squares off on Romney and says,"Son, lemme tell ya about Reagan's first cabinet meeting. He comes in, takes one look at the bunch of 'em and says 'I hate inflation, taxes, and communism - go do something about it.' and he walks out and goes to watch some old movies. See, being president isn't about trying to do it all yourself, it's about leading the team where they need to go."

Thompson is going to eat this guy alive, and hammering a guy over his wife is absolutely going to backfire. As soon as folks realize that his current wife isn't the classic trophy wife, that he was divorced for decades before they even met, it will backfire on Romney's team and he will quickly seek to distance himself from such remarks.

--patricktherogue

(To reply, click here.)

Fred Thompson isn't the reason [Romney] isn't the republican front runner. The fact that most republicans think he belongs to a cult religion is. It wouldn't matter who the front runner was, it still wouldn't be him. I think this proves that the religious right owns the Republican party if someone outside mainstream Christianity has to work double hard just to get the nomination.

--fightthetheocracy!

(To reply, click here.)

(7/26)

What did you think of this article?

Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES